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Review

First-person novelists tend to have a hard
time making the leap to screenwriting, since they’re used to putting
all the sparkling insights in their narrators’ heads and not having to
deal with dialogue, subtext, or other characters’ pesky points of view.
The literary power couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida knew enough to
try to compensate for their lack of drama chops by collaborating on
their road movie Away We Go and having dual protagonists, a
man and a woman—a give-and-take between first-person novelists, as it
were. Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are in their
early thirties, poor and rootless, living in the sticks near his
(narcissistic, unhelpful) parents. When Verona gets pregnant, the
couple decides to fly around the country visiting friends and relatives
and exploring prospective home bases: Phoenix; Tucson; Madison,
Wisconsin; Montreal; Miami. When every stopover turns out to be
horrific, sad, or horrifically sad, Burt and Verona ponder their future
with rising misery—while I pondered their faces: Krasinski’s is hard to
read behind his beard and the ironic set of his mouth, and Rudolph’s is
vaguely sniffy and pissed-off. They’re a drag, these two. Perhaps their
first-person novels would do a better job drawing you in.

Sam Mendes of American Beauty and Revolutionary Road directed,
and he’s wrong for these writers and wrong for the open road. For all
his fiddling with cameras, he’s a theater guy: His locales are
designed, not discovered or explored. Travel—finding the self by
escaping the self—is central to the novels of Eggers and Vida, but
Mendes knows where he’s going before he gets there. And so the subject
of Away We Go turns out to be not travel but child-rearing,
which is at best well-meaning and anguished and at worst downright
monstrous. A different director might have introduced some air and
softened—instead of intensified—the writers’ snobbish portraits of
parents from hell. Although it’s fun to see Allison Janney trumpet
expletives and treat her kids with riotous indifference and Maggie
Gyllenhaal (pictured, as a feminist academic) breathlessly denounce the
sadistic isolation induced by baby strollers, their scenes are still
depressing. Everything we know about their characters we learn from
their first moments onscreen—only the scale of their egocentricity is
surprising.

After all the cartoony satire, Away We Go
turns somber; Verona stops running from the pain of her parents’
deaths; and the couple realizes that home is—not to put too fine a
point on it—where the heart is. Also, that we should listen to our kids
instead of projecting things onto them. The last scene ought to be
deeply moving, but Mendes has to jack up the volume of the music to
convey its momentousness. Yet I have faith that the perfect ending
exists—a closing paragraph to die for locked away in the writers’
heads.
— David Edelstein